Kevin Hart traces the vast literary legacy and reputation of Samuel
Johnson. Through detailed analyses of the biographers, critics and
epigones who carefully crafted and preserved Johnson's life for
posterity, Hart explores the emergence of what came to be called
'the Age of Johnson'. Hart shows how late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century Britain experiencedthe emergence and consolidation of a rich and diverse culture of property. In dedicating
himself to Johnson's death, Hart argues, James Boswell turned his
friend into a monument, a piece of public property. Through subtle
analyses of copyright, forgery and heritage in eighteenth-century
life, this study traces the emergence of competing forms of cultural
property: a Hanoverian politics of property engages a Jacobite
politics of land. Kevin Hart places Samuel Johnson within this rich
cultural context, demonstrating how Johnson came to occupy a
place at the heart of the English literary canon.

KEVIN HART is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Trespass of the Sign (1990), A. D. Hope (1992), and editor of The Oxford
Book of Australian Religious Verse (1994). He is a Fellow of the
Australian Academy of Humanities.

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